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Post by sgtslag on Aug 1, 2019 0:42:16 GMT
The fish guts were made by extruding Hot Glue into water? Very well done! The sharks look suitably ravaged with rot. Add some intestines hanging out, flapping in the current, and they will be absolutely revolting, and disgusting. Your players may need a bucket... Cheers!
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Post by tauster on Sept 1, 2019 17:29:11 GMT
The fish guts were made by extruding Hot Glue into water? Very well done! The sharks look suitably ravaged with rot. Add some intestines hanging out, flapping in the current, and they will be absolutely revolting, and disgusting. Your players may need a bucket... Cheers! Glad you find it disgusting, which means you like them, I hope. 
Here's another critter I started. I recently got some dried exotic fruits, and the eucalyptus fruits a.k.a. Spidergum were jut too weird to pass up.  Some of the sprouts* broke off, revealing bundles of thin, fibrous hairs (that's where the actual seeds are, I suppose).
* ...see? I do know synonyms for tentacle!
One of the specimen had three tent... sprouts broken off in a traight row, making it look like fantastically weird eyes. All I had to do was adding a hotglue turtle shield (I made a silicone mold of a plastic toy turtle), plus a magnet glued into the bottom and that's it.
Now please enjoy looking the horror in the eyes. Not sure how I'm sposed to paint the shield. Any suggestions are welcome!
And the same applies to the tent... numerous dangling leglike appendages used mainly for swimming. They look good in their natural colors, so just adding a acrylic gloss to make them look wet might be enough. However, when yomeone of you would come up with a nice and weird color scheme for the shield, I might paint the tentacles as well.
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Post by sgtslag on Sept 2, 2019 5:03:45 GMT
Sea Turtle shell colors? Seems like a natural color selection choice to me.
I agree: clear-cote the tentacles. No other colors needed.
Yes, finding your zombie-shark disgusting DOES mean that I like it. Cheers!
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Post by margaret on Sept 2, 2019 6:08:58 GMT
You might want to bathe the bases of the operculi [those tubular caps] with glue to permanently secure them to the base. They are meant to dehisce when the stamens are ready to dispense pollen and they might suddenly fall off even without that impetus.
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Post by sgtslag on Sept 3, 2019 15:57:26 GMT
margaret , your expertise never ceases to amaze me. You are a font of diverse information. I learn new words from your posts on plants. Thank you. I always enjoy learning exotic new things from your posts: never heard the word, "dehisce," before. Looked it up, learned something new. For me, being over 1/2-century of age, to learn new things, is fun. Love it! Cheers!
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Post by margaret on Sept 5, 2019 17:10:39 GMT
Glad you look at it that way, sgtslag. Been a biologist for a long time and I have mostly given up on trying to translate precise terminology to commoner vocabulary, except for my grandchildren. And they don't get as much of an exemption any more, now that they are getting older.
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Post by tauster on Sept 16, 2019 15:39:51 GMT
I based the shell in orange, then gave it a heavy drybrush with a warm, semi-dark brown. My goal was to achieve a color combination like this... ...which I failed: I wasn't particularly impressed with the result, so I gave the shell something I'd like to call an inverted wash: I washed the spikes with a heavily watered-down metallic black, then hung the whole critter upside down so that the color flows to what will be UP later on. That way I keep the orange between the spikes and still should have, at least in theory, the effect of a wash. The while thing is drying at the moment, so I can't tell you whether or not this was a success.
...oh, and just in case that's something new, I came up with the inverted wash. On my own. Spontaneously. Didn't see this anywhere else. Please call me Tauster, the inventor of the inverted wash. |
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Post by tauster on Sept 16, 2019 18:08:17 GMT
...bullseye! 
The inverted wash worked exactly as intended, and the result is even better than I hoped! The metallic black has left a nice gradient over the spikes of the shell, and it erased the primitive look of the two-tone color scheme. I can easily see this technique working with other color schemes just as well.
The metallic pigments seem to have separated a bit from the black pigments in some places, but that just created another effect:
I'm playing with the idea of adding bright points along the tentacles, like neon blue and green warning colors you would find on some of those weird deep sea critters. What do you think? I don't want to overload this critter, and right now it looks quite good...
Fors and Cale encounter yet another weird creature on their travels. What dangers might this one bring? --> ideas welcome!
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Post by margaret on Sept 17, 2019 16:27:59 GMT
Inverted wash looks like a useful new technique. You might try out the bright points on a test stick to see how they would look before you risk your creation. I like the way the bases of the broken-off opercula look like eyes or some other sort of sensory organ.
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Post by tauster on Sept 17, 2019 18:45:01 GMT
Inverted wash looks like a useful new technique. You might try out the bright points on a test stick to see how they would look before you risk your creation. I like the way the bases of the broken-off opercula look like eyes or some other sort of sensory organ.
I thought about making a test before but the what the heck, lets try this! side in me won. Works out more often than not, so usually I take the risk.
Those three ' not-quite-eyes' were what gave me the idea of the critter. If it weren't already broken off, I'd have to break it to get that weird detail. I guess Serendipity came over for a quick visit. Not a striptease though. |
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Post by sgtslag on Sept 17, 2019 22:03:08 GMT
Love the inverted wash technique! So obvious... Once someone points it out! LOL! Thanks for 'pointing it out' to the rest of the world -- now we see it (it was there, right under our noses, all this time...). Cheers!
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Post by sgtslag on Sept 18, 2019 17:46:52 GMT
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Post by jennifer on Sept 22, 2019 18:49:58 GMT
Wow Tauster that is spectacular! |
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Post by jennifer on Sept 24, 2019 14:54:58 GMT
Tauster do you have a 3D printer now? Just curious if you stepped into that world yet. Those little $289 monoprice resin printers are nice.
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Post by tauster on Sept 24, 2019 18:13:44 GMT
Not yet jennifer. 3D printing is still a huge temptation, but I simply lack the time to get down that rabbit hole. But if I throw myself into it now, my crafting time would evaporate to zero. In summer and fall there's not much crafting time anyway, as gardening comes first. Year round there are other contestants trying to grab pieces of the 'free time budget': The kids want - and get - their share, housework, new hobbies like getting into food conservation, the workshop, and of course the books I buy faster than I can read them. And that is all before I tried getting those movies and series done... I will eventually, that is sure - price isn't a real obstacle anymore. |
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Post by tauster on Sept 29, 2019 19:38:22 GMT
I found these cute glow-in-the-dark figures on a chinese ebay seller's shop*. I had to do a research to get the reference (spoiler warning!), as manga isn't myfavourite style. I might eventually have to watch that movie, just to close that nerducation gap... * Beware those shops, seriously. They're highly addictive! All kinds of things that are useful for crafting, either as material or tool, and most of them affordable even for tight purses. Bonus points to anyone recogniznig them on the first pic! ...OK that was probably too hard. Two of them broke, so I made two half-shapes of them. Maybe that was lucky, even - now I can swap heads and can make even more different bodies. In half-light: Total darkness:
I have some glow-in-the-dark gluesticks that I might use, and of course I'm tempted to make resin ghosts (with or without fluorescent pigments mixed in). Apart from roleplaying, these might look nice in flower pots arount the house.
[update] Didn't work out as well as I thought:
Some shapes are very distorted (I guess the pressure from squeezing in the hotglue deformed some of the thiner molds), others have defects that are impossible to redo, like missing limbs or holes in the back of the head.
I guess these ghosts will be rather spooky instead of cute. Which isn't what I had planned, but OK.
As a twist, I might first introduce the players to the original minis - which are cute - and then throw the spooky ones a them!  |
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Post by tauster on Oct 3, 2019 18:35:18 GMT
Details and colors aren't the best, so I might take a few shots in daylight later. They turned out OK; not as great and gory as I hoped, but I think the 'yuck!' factor is sufficient for the encounter I have in mind.
That moldy grey-green drybrush is regular white, mixed with green glow-in-the-dark pigments. Due to the drybrush applying only little color, the effect isn't very strong though. I just had some of that color left from other projects and thought a drybrush might help to bring out the huge ampount of texture on these beasties that blended too much in. It looked OK (not great, but not bad either), so I added a high gloss varnish and declared them finished. I have too much subsea stuff to make and too little time to obsess over perfection.
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Post by sgtslag on Oct 3, 2019 18:51:44 GMT
Oh, dear Lord. They look all too real to me, as floating/swimming Zombie Sharks...
I can almost see bits falling off, as they swim. Good thing I'm not wearing a mask, and breathing through a tank, underwater -- I'd spit it out, with half the air in my lungs! Then I'd inhale, reflexively, a gallon of putrid water, right before I did the Dead Man's Float...
I think you nailed it, quite well. I'm uneasy, and a bit queasy, looking at your images. The bile is rising... Gee. Thanks for that! [Swallows. Hard. To push it all back down, again.] Ugh!
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Post by tauster on Oct 3, 2019 19:01:30 GMT
Thanks for the praise, it is well appreciated. ...oh, and for the encounter ideas you gave me! |
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Post by sgtslag on Oct 3, 2019 19:09:07 GMT
LOL! You are very welcome. Please remember to share with us, after you play this out... Cheers!
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